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18 April 2012

Pottermore, Pottermore! Wherefore art thou Pottermore?

I've been waiting thirteen years to be sorted, so what's one more day?

That's what I tell myself as I check my spam folder one more time--yes, the spam folder I've checked so rarely that I initially had trouble finding it--to make sure that the registration email from Pottermore didn't get misidentified as spam.

Nope. Apparently Pottermore, which opened registration for the general public on April 14, has so many requests to process that users may have to wait up to a day before they get their confirmation email and are able to be sorted.

I had my first Harry Potter dream when I was eleven, before I'd even read the books. Suddenly everybody I knew was talking about Harry Potter. The library's wait list was years long. Friends with copies had wait lists of their own.Everybody was talking about it in the cafeteria. I'd hear snatches of Potter talk in the hallways during the between-class locker rush. So I knew some of the characters' names and roles. I knew a bit about Quidditch. But I hadn't heard any descriptions. So my first Harry Potter dream involved me-as-Harry flying on my mom's kitchen broom through the hallways of my school, with a male teacher's voice (presumably Severus Snape) shouting "No Quidditch in the hallways!" The snitch looked like a small party hat.

I read the first three books before my twelfth birthday, but it didn't occur to me to hope for a Hogwarts letter. I had a pretty good ability to separate real life from fiction back then.*

*Unlike today...when people see me reading a vampire book and say "Oh, you like vampires?"

I always reply carefully, "I like fiction about vampires."

But yes, like practically everyone else, I got sucked into the Potterverse. My friends and I all dressed as Hogwarts characters for Halloween one year. I was Ron Weasley because I already had a set of faded-to-brown hand-me-down robes and a floppy hat that my mom had used for Halloween when she was a kid, or at least that's how I remember it. And of course I got sucked into fanfiction. The books and the movies weren't coming out fast enough. Then I started writing fanfiction. At one point, I was even a moderator at a now-defunct fan site. Now I mostly just read things like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which is easily the best HP fanfic out there and which I really can't recommend enough) and do the occasional beta reading for fanfiction writers. I don't really write it anymore; I'm working on my own things.

But yeah, I got pretty excited to register for Pottermore yesterday. I don't even know what it's going to be, at all. It could be awesome. It could be lame. But I really want to get in and start poking around. This is the culmination of 13 years of growing up with Harry Potter through the books, the movies, the fan sites -- everything. AND I DON'T WANT TO WAIT ANY LONGER.

But I will. Because I have to be an adult now. Because even if my invite comes today: I have work. I have my grad school class in the evening. Then I have sleep. Then work again.